Good find. After poking around, it seems that indeed the only options available to the OP is globally disabling quote_names / quote_char (which may be impossible) or resorting to the literal SQL as the OP found in the FAQ (I'd love to be proved wrong though). The documentation (and experiments) show that locally disabling quote_names / quote_char is difficult to the point of being not possible. Of course, as a key value, the typical SQL::Abstract "trick" of using a scalar reference \'LOWER(me.name)' is useless as well.